High-speed video of projectiles slamming into a bed of disks has given scientists a new microscopic picture of the way a meteorite or missile transfers the energy of its impact to sand and dirt grains. The transfer is jerky, not smooth, and much more complex than scientists previously thought, according to Duke physicist Robert Behringer, who led the research.

In the study, supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the team shot bronze disks into a narrow bed of photoelastic grains and used an ultrafast camera to track the collision energy as it shifted from the disk to the beads. The footage shows that the bronze disk loses most of its energy in intense, sporadic acoustic pulses along networks of grains, or force chains, in the bed of beads.